Welcome to the 65th issue of the GBAtemp Recommends Revival Project! This project is a weekly feature where we share our favourite games and applications with you. The titles we recommend may be "old school" games, a piece of Homebrew, a ROM hack, sleeper hits, an application, etc, but one thing's for certain, we think they are fantastic and deserve your attention! Sorry for the delay, I had to meet my girlfriends Dad last night so this was forgotten. ​

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Cannon Fodder​

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From the makers of Sensible Soccer, Wizkid & Mega Lo Mania, this was developed in one room by six people. This is a military style action/strategy title which conveyed a anti-war message as well as dark humour...something British developers did quite often on the good old Commodore Amiga.​

You controlled a team of soldiers, sent into the battlefield and the aim of the game was to simply wipe out the enemy. You could play this in whichever way you want, simply as a point and click shooter or you can work out a strategy which could work out for the best. Going gung-ho may not always work out, sometimes you may need to split a squad up to draw a enemy out or to cut down on "collateral damage". Unlike other strategy titles at the time, you had direct control of all of the soldiers in the game. No clicking on a character and directing them to automatically attack the enemy, you did it all yourself. I know some people who aren't into strategy titles who love this game so don't be turned off by that element.​

One of the stand-out aspects of the game was the way it handled death. If one of your characters died...he stayed dead and was then replaced by another soldier and that dead soldier was then given a gravestone to further drive through the point that you have just lost someone. Going through several levels of the game and then losing that character actually meant something, much like in Nintendo's fantastic Fire Emblem series.​

The game has a pixelly look to the characters but the lush jungles/farms/snowy landscapes were very nicely detailed. The art had a fantastic sense of character that was carried over from Sensible Software and became a bit of a trademark style for the developer. Also, for me it was the first game where I could kill a enemy and just move the corpse around with my bullets...I spent ages doing that. The sound was fantastic and led to a great sense of atmosphere. Birds chirping in the backgrounds, rivers flowing all added to the experience. Oh and another thing...DAT THEME TUNE!​

The game caused a lot of controversy from the dumbass press, who completely missed the anti-war message and felt that it made fun of British veterans when in fact to me it really helped make light of the "expendable" nature of how we send our troops out there.​

Overall this is one of the finest games created and felt extremely fresh when it came out, still does today. The game was ported to many many platforms, all of which actually do a very good job although for me you can't beat good old mouse control so I do recommend playing this on PC. As a side note the Gameboy Colour version was extraordinary in that it retained pretty much the sound and gameplay style and is actually my favourite none Amiga/PC version. There is also a nice DS homebrew port of the game.​

It spawned two sequels. One was more of a sc-fi/alien take and was decent but was lacking what made the original great and the 3rd game released by Codemasters last year was an absolute piece of shit which was made by a bunch of hack shovelware devs. Sensible Software were remaking this for the PSP but that fell through.​

I can certainly recommend the DS homebrew (AlekMaul did loads of ports/remakes of games of this vintage)- best thing to play it on other than an amiga (or I guess DOS with a mouse) in my opinion.

Also if you are getting into the sequel then http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/cf2/cf2.htm makes a good read. Never played the third game (indeed I did not know there was one until it was mentioned around here some time back), but if Hadrian sees fit to showcase that much distain for it I will not even bother to look up some gameplay.

Edit- and like the good little masochist that I am I went and looked up 3....... I think I need a little sit down.

Next Tuesday will be the start of "A Month of Gameboy", four weeks of Gameboy games! There will also be a special extra edition during those four weeks where we celebrate 20 years of a certain franchise.